Author Topic: The end of the Hard Disks  (Read 25133 times)

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Online coppice

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Re: The end of the Hard Disks
« Reply #200 on: September 11, 2024, 10:48:09 pm »
If I had a 1TB SD card or similar, how long would I need to have it powered up for it to refresh itself? A similar time it would take to write data to all locations like in normal usage?
That's an excellent question. They makers tell you that background refresh occurs when the devices are powered up, but I haven't seen anything (e.g. in the SMART data) that shows the status of that refreshing.
 

Offline Mechatrommer

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Re: The end of the Hard Disks
« Reply #201 on: September 13, 2024, 06:11:16 am »
98% of all the data is worthless in 10 years anyways.

I have a box here of photographs, slides and super-8, some of which are > 100 years old and still in "relatively" good condition. They show things as esoteric as the Queen Marys first visit to the port of Fremantle, through to my grandparents and parents history. Based on the rate of deterioration, I'd be surprised if they weren't still readable in another 100 years.

I have a (several) hard drive full of photos and video of my dead son. They document and detail a significant part of his life and are the only remaining visual artifacts we have of him. We can print them out, but the prints deteriorate rapidly when compared to a proper photographic process.
developing photos using chemicals is gone, today is inkjet age you like it or not... if you are really tight... buy cheap consumer grade color printer brand XXX (i use Epson) and buy their photographic grade ink and paper (i use UltraChrome K3 meant for SureLab and Epson Photo Paper), you probably need to tune the color profile in SW or if money still allows, ask one time service for color calibration from whoever has the device (i use Datacolor SpyderX Studio) then you can print your photos all you like with 50-100 yrs longevity. laminate to get 2-3X lifetime, put it in air tight container only to pull out during national holiday every year, and let a little bit light come through into the container to avoid Fungus development (we have one here in this forum ;D)

Therefore we're left to curate and manage this digital archive. It won't be worthless in 10 years, but unless it's replicated onto new media periodically it also won't be readable. I don't trust the LTO will still be readable in 50 years (as specified), and even if it is maintaining a working drive to retrieve it will be a challenge. So we're left to ensure the storage media is kept up to date. Currently magnetic trumps solid state for longevity, so I don't see hard disks going away any time soon.
i printed some of kids/family photos but huge amount are still in HDD (frequently backup and replaced every 5-10yrs) copying job is "some job" i cant count on my kids to take such a job when i'm gone, so one day when i'm free, its better for me to printout the most important moments for my grand grand children to see... if they can continue the HDD/SSD backup job its better... SSD is getting better and cheaper now, and of course much faster than HDD, so i have high confidence HDD will be gone too.. 1TB SSD is getting into "affordable price" range and data retention without power is also improving into years range...ymmv.
Nature: Evolution and the Illusion of Randomness (Stephen L. Talbott): Its now indisputable that... organisms “expertise” contextualizes its genome, and its nonsense to say that these powers are under the control of the genome being contextualized - Barbara McClintock
 

Online tooki

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Re: The end of the Hard Disks
« Reply #202 on: September 15, 2024, 09:21:43 am »
98% of all the data is worthless in 10 years anyways.

I have a box here of photographs, slides and super-8, some of which are > 100 years old and still in "relatively" good condition. They show things as esoteric as the Queen Marys first visit to the port of Fremantle, through to my grandparents and parents history. Based on the rate of deterioration, I'd be surprised if they weren't still readable in another 100 years.

I have a (several) hard drive full of photos and video of my dead son. They document and detail a significant part of his life and are the only remaining visual artifacts we have of him. We can print them out, but the prints deteriorate rapidly when compared to a proper photographic process. Therefore we're left to curate and manage this digital archive. It won't be worthless in 10 years, but unless it's replicated onto new media periodically it also won't be readable. I don't trust the LTO will still be readable in 50 years (as specified), and even if it is maintaining a working drive to retrieve it will be a challenge. So we're left to ensure the storage media is kept up to date. Currently magnetic trumps solid state for longevity, so I don't see hard disks going away any time soon.
Multiple copies of the digital files are definitely important.

But FYI, the longevity of printed copies depends entirely on the printing process used.

You can still get silver halide based digital photo prints done at some photo labs/studios. But it’s becoming hard to find for sure. And remember that color silver halide doesn’t last that well, especially in sunlight. Look at how color photos from the 60s have deteriorated as the color dyes fade.

Dye sublimation looks great, but I don’t think it’s the very best for archival storage, since it’s dye based.

Laser printouts should be very durable (since the colors are pigments, not dyes), but they aren’t the very best photo quality.

Inkjet is where the professional market has gone. But don’t think for a moment that it’s the same as what you get from a $100 home inkjet. Most home inkjets use dye inks, which aren’t that great for longevity, and when printed on plain paper the lightfastness is poor. But if you use a printer with archival pigment inks, on the matching photo paper, the results should last at least as long as color silver halide prints, if not longer.

Both Canon and Epson have pigment-based photo inkjet printers, but only Epson has inks that are expressly claimed to be archival. (And not on all models, you must look carefully.) With that said, even dye prints on photo paper, stored in ideal conditions (in the dark, stacked to keep oxygen away) last a long time. I have photos I printed on a dye-based Canon 20 years ago, onto Canon and Ilford photo papers, stored properly, and they look the same as they did when first printed. Prints protected by glass (i.e. framed) also last a lot longer, since glass blocks UV and oxygen quite effectively.

Many photo labs now use inkjet, too, both from Epson and Canon, but also from the traditional vendors of photo lab equipment, like Noritusu. (Some is pigment based, others dye-based, though they swear they’re long-lasting dyes that resist fading.)
 

Offline TimFox

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Re: The end of the Hard Disks
« Reply #203 on: September 15, 2024, 01:56:18 pm »
High-end color inkjet printing is sometimes called "giclée".
Be careful when googling that word:  in French, it also means "ejaculate".
 

Online Kjelt

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Re: The end of the Hard Disks
« Reply #204 on: September 15, 2024, 05:21:37 pm »
Last year I bought a negative scanner to digitize my fathers negatives.
Slow as hell but hey... but also here there are negatives where there is no correct firmula to correct all the colors. Kodak Kodachrome X for example. There were so many different films made.....
To continue, many of  the negatives that were stored in special A4 paper negative holders did not prevent some mold to totally ruin the negatives.
The positives we had left, the colors faded. These were from 1971.
The special scanner software has some early AI scratch remover but this mold is too extreme it is inside the film. Tried to clean with IPA etc. to no prevail.
« Last Edit: September 15, 2024, 05:23:42 pm by Kjelt »
 

Offline Zoli

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Re: The end of the Hard Disks
« Reply #205 on: September 16, 2024, 06:14:20 am »
The C41 negative process(introduced in'72) in the last step(stabilization) has some formaldehyde exactly to prevent molding the gelatinous emulsion.
As longevity of the pictures: Cibachrome/Ilfochrome and the dye transfer(as example Kodachrome) has longevity comparable to the acrylic paints.
As side note, the last two steps(stabilization and washing) in my experience(from the 80's  photo lab work) is crucial to the long term stability of the pictures(the longer, the better - within the limit of the materials used).
 

Offline Bryn

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Re: The end of the Hard Disks
« Reply #206 on: September 18, 2024, 06:37:12 pm »
Hard disks will always be with us the same way physical cash will be with us too.

Unrelated to the topic somewhat but not everybody would be a fan of saving files on the cloud...
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Offline David Hess

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Offline Mechatrommer

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Nature: Evolution and the Illusion of Randomness (Stephen L. Talbott): Its now indisputable that... organisms “expertise” contextualizes its genome, and its nonsense to say that these powers are under the control of the genome being contextualized - Barbara McClintock
 
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Online tooki

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Re: The end of the Hard Disks
« Reply #209 on: September 18, 2024, 07:36:25 pm »
As longevity of the pictures: Cibachrome/Ilfochrome and the dye transfer(as example Kodachrome) has longevity comparable to the acrylic paints.
I don't believe for a second that Kodachrome is as durable as acrylic paint: pigments are much more stable than dyes. Kodak itself says that Kodachrome slides will fade visibly in an hour of projection. They're "durable" only when stored in the dark. (Which is still useful, but it's a big caveat.)
 

Offline Bryn

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Offline Mechatrommer

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Re: The end of the Hard Disks
« Reply #211 on: September 18, 2024, 08:18:02 pm »
probably will look like the Vox...
Nature: Evolution and the Illusion of Randomness (Stephen L. Talbott): Its now indisputable that... organisms “expertise” contextualizes its genome, and its nonsense to say that these powers are under the control of the genome being contextualized - Barbara McClintock
 

Online tooki

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Re: The end of the Hard Disks
« Reply #212 on: September 18, 2024, 08:22:13 pm »
High-end color inkjet printing is sometimes called "giclée".
Be careful when googling that word:  in French, it also means "ejaculate".
Yep. I've known that for years, and it's always struck me as absolutely absurd, and insanely pretentious.

I appreciate that more and more, the art world has been switching to just calling them "digital prints" or even "inkjet".

<printernerd>
N.B. The inkjet printers used when this term originated, the Iris continuous inkjets, were absolutely fascinating beasts. They worked fundamentally unlike the drop-on-demand inkjets we now use. First of all, the paper was mounted to a drum, like in a drum scanner. The small printhead moves across the drum slowly, so the paper passes by thousands of times as the drum spins. But the head is the big difference: instead of nozzles that fire on demand, Iris printers use piezoelectric transducers to eject drops from a small row of nozzles at the same time. Every nozzle fires every time, all the time. (Around 1 million per second in the Iris.) The ink drops are selectively statically charged with a row of electrodes just beyond the nozzles (one electrode per nozzle), then deflection plates deflect the desired droplets onto the page. The uncharged droplets continued into the gutter, which then feeds into the waste ink jug. Iris printers used bulk ink bottles, and since most of the ink was wasted, the waste jug was huge. The reason for doing this? Large-format 1800dpi color in 1989, when drop-on-demand inkjets were struggling to do decent 300dpi A4/letter black and white. The flip side was a 6-figure price tag, huge ink waste, and slow printing. They were originally intended for prepress proofs.

I saw an Iris at a computer/publishing expo in the mid 90s. The prints were gorgeous.

Further reading:
https://www.imaging.org/IST/IST/Resources/Tutorials/Inkjet.aspx
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/43556768.pdf   page 14ff
https://students.aiu.edu/submissions/profiles/resources/onlineBook/V9D6F9_Inkjet_Printing.pdf   page 74ff

Continuous inkjet still exists, mostly for industrial inkjet printing of things like expiration dates, since it can print at longer distances than on-demand inkjet. Unlike the Iris, though, the waste ink is not discarded, but is instead recycled, with solvent monitoring to compensate for solvent evaporation as the ink cycles around and around.

Iris's technology ultimately ended up with Kodak, which makes continuous inkjet printing presses today. (They reverse the droplet deflection: uncharged droplets go to the page, waste ink is deflected. They recirculate the ink, too.)
</printernerd>
 
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Online coppice

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Re: The end of the Hard Disks
« Reply #213 on: September 19, 2024, 04:47:03 pm »
As longevity of the pictures: Cibachrome/Ilfochrome and the dye transfer(as example Kodachrome) has longevity comparable to the acrylic paints.
I don't believe for a second that Kodachrome is as durable as acrylic paint: pigments are much more stable than dyes. Kodak itself says that Kodachrome slides will fade visibly in an hour of projection. They're "durable" only when stored in the dark. (Which is still useful, but it's a big caveat.)
Being as durable as acrylic paint isn't very impressive. Most acrylic paint doesn't last very long.

The problem with the lifetime of film products is they are very hard to predict. Take photos of a similar age that were processed in the same shop on different days, and have been displayed in a lounge side by side since. The amount of ageing can be radically different, apparently just from day to day variation is the original manufacture of materials, or their processing.
 


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